Thursday, April 23, 2015

Wow, it seems like just yesterday, we were celebrating Hubble's 21st birthday, back when the intrepid eye-in-the-sky was old enough for a beer!

On April 24, 1990, STS-31 Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off on its mission to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) into orbit. This amazing astronomical observatory, a joint NASA-ESA project, has now been orbiting above Earth's atmosphere and observing celestial bodies for more than two solid decades!

Named after astronomer Edwin P. Hubble (1889-1953), the HST is capable of taking extremely sharp images in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelengths, and many of its captures have led to incredible astrophysical breakthroughs, not the least of which is accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe. In our own neighborhood, HST taught us a great deal about TNOs, dwarf planets and KBOs; and the very farthest objects seen, in Hubble Ultra Deep Field, or HUDF, are galaxies 13 billion light years away!!

To date, Hubble has observed more than a million celestial targets and amassed more than 100 terabytes of data in multiple archives!

Not too shabby for a telescope with a rather... inauspiciously blurry beginning!

Click to embiggen

Plaque reads: "Inside Hubble is one large, round, curved mirror and other smaller mirrors that focus light into cameras and other scientific equipment. When Hubble was launched and scientists first turned it on, they had a problem: the pictures were blurry! It's large, round mirror accidentally had the wrong curved shape, so the telescope couldn't focus. Luckily, the problem could be fixed by adding more small mirrors to the telescope, and in 1993, a crew of astronauts flew up and carefully slid them into place. It was like putting on a pair of eyeglasses. Suddenly, Hubble could see stars, galaxies, and gas clouds much fainter and farther than anyone had ever seen before."

Before and After
Click to embiggen again

In May 2009, the fifth and final service mission, STS-125 Atlantis,
captured Hubble to replace gyroscopes, computers, and scientific
instruments over a whopping 37 hours of space walks! With that marathon
upgrade, they made the telescope 100 times more powerful than when it launched. Human hands (or rather spacesuit gloves) won't touch it again, but hopefully it will last at least another decade.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

So today I get to hit you with the best three minutes and thirty seconds you have ever seen on YouTube. And if you're a fan of Star Wars, you will of course consider this an R2-D2 "spinoff" film -- hopefully the first of many??

The aerial shots and special effects alone are worth the cinematic interest, the sound effects are a crack-up, and to anyone who has grown up watching Star Wars (and that's all of us), it's stunning the degree to which this little droid can still draw adoration from our hearts.

"I don't know. Fly casual."

Who hasn't fallen head-over-wheels in love this way, fallen into depression after being chase off by a Sithy-bot, but then prevailed by finding an even better electrical match? Aww, don't cry over stolen mailboxes, R2. (Because C-3PO totally would have called her "Yoko," anyway.)

The short-and-sweet film was written and directed by engineer Evan Atherton, who together with the star's R2-D2 builder and film producer Grant McKinney, used Autodesk's Pier 9 workshop in San Francisco to 3D print parts for R2-KT (the pink robot love interest).

Monday, April 6, 2015

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to enter space. Secured in a small capsule named Vostok 1, he launched from Leninsk, Kazakhstan (now renamed "Baikonur"), the first and still-largest space launch facility in the world. The 27-year-old cosmonaut made a historic 106-minute (not 108!) orbital flight around planet Earth.

Юрий Гагарин 1934 - 1968

In 1962, the Soviet Union established День Космонавтики, or "Cosmonautics Day,” to commemorate this amazing achievement.

In 2001, Loretta Hidalgo, George T. Whitesides and Trish Garner founded "Yuri’s Night," with the support of the Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC) — and each year since, the parties celebrating the first human in space have only grown larger! This year, festivities all around the world are being held between April 4th – April 12th. The current count for Yuri’s Night parties is 160 parties in 42 countries!

The goal of Yuri's Night is to increase public interest in space exploration and to inspire a new generation of explorers. Driven by a worldwide network of celebrations and educational events, Yuri's Night creates a global community committed to the future of exploration while developing leaders and innovators.

The highlight of the Yuri's Night celebration will be a LIVE Skype session with astronaut Dan Bursch at 5:00pm, to reflect on the significance of Yuri Gagarin's historical flight into space and answer questions from any and all space enthusiasts.

Please feel free to come in a space-themed costume! And bring your camera. There will be lots of good photo ops!